W. S.
Di Piero was born in 1945 in an Italian working class neighborhood
in South Philadelphia and educated at St. Joseph's College. He
left South Philadelphia in 1968, and after taking an M.A. degree
in San Francisco and working odd jobs (tutor, commercial translator,
movie reviewer, free lance editor) there and later in Italy and
Vermont, he began teaching full time in 1976 at Louisiana State
University and later at Northwestern. In 1982 he joined Stanford's
Creative Writing Program, where he teaches part time. He's a frequent
contributor to Threepenny Review , a regular art reviewer
for the San Diego Reader, and once or twice a year reviews
for the New York Times Book Review. His poems have appeared
in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Hudson Review, TriQuarterly,
and many other journals. The most recent of his several books
of poems are The Restorers (1992) and Shadows Burning
(1995). He's the author also of three collections of essays on
literature, art, and personal experience: Memory and Enthusiasm
(1989); Out Of Eden : Essays on Modern Art (1991); and
Shooting the Works: On Poetry and Pictures (1996). His
translations from the Italian include a version of Giacomo Leopardi's
Pensieri and The Ellipse: Selected Poems of Leonardo Sinisgalli
. His translation of Euripides' Ion appeared in 1996. His latest
book of poems, Skirts and Slacks, was published by Knopf
in 2001. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment
for the Arts grant, an Ingram-Merrill Award, and a Lila Wallace-Readers
Digest Writer's Award. He lives in San Francisco.